‘Well now, you do that, Paul,’ Kurtz advised heartily when Alexis had finished. Then his voice changed: ‘And while you’re talking to the Minister, Paul, just you make sure you tell him all about that Swiss bank account of yours as well. Because if you don’t, I may be so impressed by your fine example of candour that I’ll have to go down there and tell him about it myself.’
After which Kurtz ordered his switchboard to receive no more calls from Alexis for the next forty-eight hours. But Kurtz bore no grudges. Not with agents. The cooling-off period over, he squeezed himself a free day and made his own pilgrimage to Frankfurt, where he found the good Doctor much recovered. The reference to the Swiss bank account, though Alexis ruefully called it ‘unsporting’, had sobered him, but the factor most conducive to his recovery was the joyous sight of his own features in the middle pages of a mass-circulation German tabloid – resolute, dedicated, but always that underlying Alexis wit – which convinced him he was who they said he was. Kurtz left him with this happy fiction and, as a prize, brought back one tantalising clue for his overworked analysts that Alexis in his dudgeon had been holding back: the photocopy of a picture postcard addressed to Astrid Berger under one of her many other aliases.
Handwriting unfamiliar, postmark the seventh district of Paris. Intercepted by the German post office, on orders from Cologne.
The text, in English, ran: ‘Poor Uncle Frei will be operated next month as planned. But at least that is convenient because you can use V’s house. See you there. Love K.’
Three days later, the same dragnet pulled in a second in the same hand, sent to another of Berger’s safe addresses, the postmark this time Stockholm. Alexis, fully collaborating once more, had it flown to Kurtz by special delivery. The text was brief: ‘Frei appendectomy room 251 at 1800 hours 24th.’ And the signature was ‘M’, which told the analysts there was a missing communication in between; or such, at least, had been the pattern by which Michel had also from time to time received his orders. Postcard L, despite everyone’s efforts, was never found. Instead, two of Litvak’s girls picked up a letter posted by the quarry herself, in this case Berger, to none other than Anton Mesterbein in Geneva. The thing was finely done. Berger was visiting Hamburg at the time, staying with one of her many lovers in an upper-class commune in Blankanese. Following her into town one day, the girls saw her drop a letter surreptitiously into a postbox. The moment she had gone, they posted an envelope of their own, a big yellow one, franked and ready for just such a contingency, to lie on top of it. Then the prettier of the girls stood guard over the box. When the postman came to empty it, she pitched him such a story about love and anger, and made such explicit promises to him, that he stood by grinning sheepishly while she fished her letter out of the bunch before it ruined her life for ever. Except that it was not her letter but Astrid Berger’s, nestling just beneath the big yellow envelope. Having steamed it open and photographed it, they got it back in the same box in time for the next collection.
The prize was an eight-page scrawl of gushing schoolgirl passion. She must have been high when she wrote it, but perhaps on nothing more than her own adrenaline. It was frank, it praised Mesterbein’s sexual powers. It shot away on wild ideological detours arbitrarily linking El Salvador with the West German defence budget, and the elections in Spain with some recent scandal in South Africa. It raged about the Zionist bombings of Lebanon and spoke of the Israelis’ ‘Final Solution’ for the Palestinians. It delighted in life, but saw everything wrong everywhere; and on the clear assumption that Mesterbein’s mail was being read by the authorities, it referred virtuously to the need to remain ‘within the legal borders at all times’. But it had a postscript, one line, scribbled off like a parting conceit, heavily underscored, and backed with exclamation marks. A strutting, teasing pun, personal to both of them, yet, like other parting words, containing perhaps the purpose of the whole discourse up to this point. And it was in French: Attention! On va épater les ’Bourgeois!
The analysts froze at the sight of it. Why the capital ‘B’? Why the underlining? Was Helga’s education so poor that she applied her native German usage to French nouns? The idea was ridiculous. And why the apostrophe, so carefully added above and to the left of it? While the cryptologists and analysts sweated blood to break the code, while the computers shuddered and creaked and sobbed out impossible permutations, it was the uncomplicated Rachel, none other, with her English North Country directness, who sailed straight for the obvious conclusion. Rachel did crosswords in her spare time and dreamed of winning a free car. ‘Uncle Frei’ was one half, she declared simply, and ‘Bourgeois’ was the other. The ‘Freibourgeois’ were the people of Freiburg, and they were to be shocked by an ‘operation’ that would take place at six in the evening of the twenty-fourth. Room 251? ‘Well, we’d have to enquire, wouldn’t we?’ she told the bemused experts.
Yes, they agreed. We would.
The computers were switched off, but still, for a day or two, scepticism lingered. The supposition was absurd. Too easy. Frankly childish.
Yet, as they had learned already, Helga and her kind eschewed almost as a matter of philosophy any systematic method of communication. Comrades should speak to each other from one revolutionary heart to another, in looped allusions beyond the grasp of pigs.
Put it to the test, they said.
There were half a dozen Freiburgs at least, but their first thought was the little town of Freiburg in Mesterbein’s native Switzerland, where French and German were spoken side by side, and where the bourgeoisie, even among the Swiss themselves, is famed for its stolidity. With no further delay, Kurtz dispatched a pair of very soft-footed researchers with orders to ferret out any conceivable target attractive to anti-Jewish attack, with a special eye to business houses with Israeli defence contracts; to check, as best they could without official help, all rooms 251, whether in hospitals, hotels, or office buildings; and the names of all patients scheduled for appendectomies on the twenty-fourth of the month; or for operations of any sort at 1800 hours on that day.
From the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem Kurtz obtained an up-to-date list of prominent Jews known to be resident in the town, together with their places of worship and association. Was there a Jewish hospital? If not, a hospital that catered to Orthodox Jewish needs? And so on.
Yet Kurtz was arguing against his own convictions, as they all were. Such targets lacked all the dramatic effect that had distinguished their predecessors; they would épater nobody; they made no point that anyone could think of.
Till one afternoon in the middle of all this – almost as if their energies, applied at one spot, had forced the truth into the open at another – Rossino, the murderous Italian, took a plane from Vienna to Basel, where he rented a motorbike. Crossing the border into Germany, he drove forty minutes to the ancipgent cathedral city of Freiburg-im-Breisgau, once the capital of the state of Baden. There, having first enjoyed a lavish luncheon, he presented himself to the university’s Rektorat and enquired courteously about a course of lectures on humanist subjects that was available, on a limited basis, to members of the general public. And more covertly, where room 251 was situated on the university’s diagram of its premises.
It was a dart of light through the fog. Rachel was right; Kurtz was right; God was just, and so was Misha Gavron. The market forces had found their natural solution.
Only Gadi Becker did not share the general elation.
Where was he?
There were times when others seemed to know the answer better than he himself. One day he was pacing about the house in Disraeli Street, focusing his restless stare on the cipher machines, which, far too rarely for his taste, reported sightings of his agent, Charlie. The same night – or, more accurately, on the early morning of the next day – he was pressing the doorbell of Kurtz’s house, waking Elli and the dogs, and demanding reassurances that there would be no strike against Tayeh or whomever until Charlie was laid off; he had heard rumours, he said: ‘Misha Gavron is
not famous for his patience,’ he said drily.
If anyone came back from the field – the boy known as Dimitri, for instance, or his companion Raoul, exfiltrated by rubber boat – Becker insisted on being present at his debriefing, and firing questions at him regarding her condition.
After a few days of this, Kurtz got sick of the sight of him – ‘haunting me like my own bad conscience’ – and threatened openly to forbid him the house, until wiser counsels got the better of him. ‘An agent-runner without his agent is a conductor without an orchestra,’ he explained to Elli profoundly, while he wrestled to quell his own anger. ‘More appropriate is to humour him, help him to pass the time.’
Secretly, with no one’s connivance but Elli’s, Kurtz rang Frankie, telling her that her former husband was in town, and giving her the number to reach him; for Kurtz, with Churchillian magnanimity, expected everyone to have a marriage like his own.
Frankie duly phoned; Becker listened to her voice for a time – if indeed it was he who answered – and softly replaced the receiver on its cradle without replying, which enraged her.
Kurtz’s ploy had some effect, however, for the next day Becker set out on what was later regarded as a kind of journey of self-appraisal regarding the basic assumptions of his life. Hiring a car, he drove first to Tel Aviv, where, having transacted some pessimistic business with his bank manager, he visited the old cemetery where his father was buried. He put flowers on the grave, cleaned meticulously around it with a trowel that he borrowed, and said Kaddish aloud, though neither he nor his father had ever had much time for religion. From Tel Aviv he headed south-east to Hebron or, as Michel would have called it, El Khalil. He visited the mosque of Abraham, which since the war of ’67 doubles uneasily as a synagogue; he chatted to the reservist soldiers, in their sloppy bush hats and shirts unbuttoned to the belly, who lounged at the entrance and patrolled the battlements.
Becker, they told each other when he had gone – except that they used his Hebrew name – the legendary Gadi himself – the man who fought the battle for the Golan from behind the Syrian lines – what the hell was he doing in this Arab hellhole, looking so uneasy?
Under their admiring gaze, he wandered through the ancient covered market, apparently unheeding of the explosive quiet and of the smouldering dark glances of the occupied. And sometimes, seemingly with other thoughts in mind, he paused and spoke to a shopkeeper in Arabic, asking after a spice or the price of a pair of shoes, while small boys gathered round to listen to him, and once, for a dare, to touch his hand. Returning to his car, he nodded farewell to the troops and headed into the small roads that thread themselves among the rich red grape terraces, until he came by stages to the hilltop Arab villages on the eastern side, with their squat stone houses and Eiffel Tower aerials on the roofs. A light snow lay on the upper slopes; stacks of dark cloud gave the earth a cruel and unappeasing glow. Across the valley, a huge new Israeli settlement stood like the emissary of some conquering planet.
And in one of the villages, Becker got out and took the air. It was where Michel’s family had lived until ’67 when his father had seen fit to flee.
‘So did he go visit his own tomb as well?’ Kurtz demanded sourly when he heard all this. ‘First his father’s, now his own – did he?’
A moment’s puzzlement preceded the general laughter as they recalled the Islamic belief that Joseph son of Isaac had also been buried at Hebron, which every Jew knows to be untrue.
From Hebron, it seems, Becker drove northward up the Jordan Valley to Beit She’an, an Arab town resettled by the Jews when it was left empty in the war of ’48. Having dawdled there long enough to admire the Roman amphitheatre, he continued at a slow pace to Tiberias, which is fast becoming the modern spa-city of the north, with giant new American-style hotels along the waterfront, a lido, many cranes, and an excellent Chinese restaurant. But his interest there seemed to be slight, for he did not stop, but merely drove slowly, peering out of the window at the skyscrapers as if counting them. He surfaced next at Metulla, at the very northern border with Lebanon. A ploughed strip with several depths of wire marked the frontier, named in better days The Good Fence. On one side, Israeli citizens stood on an observation platform, gazing with bewildered expressions through the barbed wire into badland. On the other, the Lebanese Christian militia drove up and down in all manner of transport, receiving their Israeli supplies for the interminable blood feud against the Palestinian usurper.
But Metulla in those days was also the natural terminus for courier lines running up to Beirut, and Gavron’s service maintained a discreet section there to administer its agents in transit. The great Becker presented himself in the early evening, leafed through the section’s logbook, asked some desultory questions about the location of United Nations forces, left again. Looking troubled, the section Commander said. Maybe sick. Sick in his eyes and his complexion.
‘So what the devil was he looking for?’ Kurtz asked of the Commander when he heard this. But the Commander, a prosaic man and dulled by secrecy, could offer no further theories. Troubled, he repeated. The way agents look sometimes when they come in from a long run.
And still Becker kept driving, till he reached a twisting mountain road ripped by tank tracks, and continued by way of it to the kibbutz where, if anywhere, he kept his heart: an eagle’s-nest perched high above the Lebanon on three sides. The place first became a Jewish habitation in ’48, when it was established as a military strongpoint to control the only east-west road south of the Litani. In ’52, the first young sabra settlers arrived there to live the hard, secular life that was once the Zionist ideal. Since then, the kibbutz had endured occasional shellings, apparent affluence, and a worrying depletion in its membership. Sprinklers were playing on the lawns as Becker arrived; the air was sweet with the scent of red and pink roses. His hosts received him shyly, and with great excitement.
‘You have come to join us finally, Gadi? Your fighting days are over? Listen, there is a house waiting for you. You can move in tonight!’
He laughed, but did not say yes or no. He asked for a couple of days’ work, but there was little they could give him; it was the slack season, they explained. The fruit and cotton were all picked, the trees pruned, the fields ploughed in readiness for the spring. Then, because he insisted, they promised he might dole out the food in the communal dining-room. But what they really wanted of him was his opinion on the way the country was going – from Gadi, who, if anyone, can tell us. Which meant, of course, that they wished him most of all to hear their own opinions – of this rackety government, of the decadence of Tel Aviv politics.
‘We came here to work, to fight for our identity, to turn Jews into Israelis, Gadi! Are we to be a country finally – or are we to be a showcase for international Jewry? What is our future, Gadi? Tell us!’
They addressed these questions to him with a trusting liveliness, as if he were some kind of prophet among them, come to give fresh inwardness to their outdoor lives; they could not know – not at first, anyway – that they were speaking into the void of his own soul. And whatever happened to all our fine talk of coming to terms with the Palestinians, Gadi? The great mistake was in ’67, they decided, answering their own questions as usual: in ’67 we should have been generous; we should have offered them a proper deal. Who can be generous if not the victors: ‘We are so powerful, Gadi, and they so weak!’
But after a while, these insoluble issues became too familiar to Becker, and in keeping with his introverted mood he took to sauntering about the camp alone. His favourite spot was a smashed watchtower that looked straight down into a little Shiite town, and north-eastward to the Crusader bastion of Beaufort, at that time still in Palestinian hands. They saw him there on his last evening with them, standing clear of any cover, as close to the electronic border fence as he could get without actually setting off the alarms. He had a light side and a dark side because of the setting sun, and he seemed, by his erect posture, to be inviting the whole Litani basin
to know that he was there.
Next morning, he had returned to Jerusalem and, having presented himself at Disraeli Street, spent the day wandering the city’s streets where he had fought so many battles and seen the shedding of so much blood, his own included. And still he seemed to question everything he saw. He stared in dazed bewilderment at the sterile arches of the recreated Jewish quarter; he sat himself in the lobbies of the tower hotels that now wreck the Jerusalem skyline, and brooded over the parties of decent American citizens from Oshkosh, Dallas, and Denver who had come in their jumbo-loads, in good faith and middle age, to keep in touch with their heritage. He peered into the little boutiques that sold hand-embroidered Arab kaftans and Arab artefacts guaranteed by the proprietor; he listened to the innocent chatter of the tourists, inhaled their costly scents, and heard them complain, but with comradely politeness, about the quality of the New York-style cuts of prime beef, which were not somehow just the way they tasted back home. And he spent a whole afternoon in the Holocaust Museum, worrying over the photographs of children who would have been his age if they had lived.
Having heard all this, Kurtz cut short Becker’s leave and put him back to work. Find out about Freiburg, he told him. Comb the libraries, the records. Find out who we know there, get the layout of the university. Get architects’ drawings and town plans. Work out everything we need and double it. By yesterday.
A good fighting man is never normal, Kurtz told Elli, to console himself. If he’s not plain stupid, he thinks too much.
But to himself Kurtz marvelled to discover how deeply his unrecovered ewe-lamb could still anger him.
The Little Drummer Girl Page 49